Real estate transactions often involve a buyer, a seller, one or more agents (e.g., a listing agent for the seller and buyer's agent for the buyer), and numerous service providers (e.g., escrow professionals, appraisers, home inspectors, lenders, and so forth). In a typical purchase transaction, the seller lists a property using a listing server, often through a listing agent, while buyers go through a search process to identify potential properties to buy. Once the buyer identifies a property the buyer wants to buy, the buyer makes an offer to the seller, potentially each through their respective agents. The seller may either accept the offer, counteroffer at a different price or other terms, or reject the offer. Once an offer or counteroffer has been accepted, the transaction is typically considered pending and on the way to closing pending inspections, resolving various contingencies, securing funds from a lender, and so forth.
Because of the many events and parties involved in a real estate transaction, it is often difficult for buyers and sellers to keep track of the details of their effort. Buyers need to react quickly to new listings, price drops, and open houses. They also need to coordinate with their agent (and possibly with co-buyers) on events like inspections, contingency removal, loans, and so on. Sellers also need to be aware of price changes that affect the market, changes to the status of nearby homes, and the like. They also need to coordinate with their agent on events like changes to their listing, buyer inspections, and so forth. Keeping track of all of these details can be overwhelming. It is easy to miss important events, milestones, or deadlines. Some of the relevant information for keeping track of these events is not publicly available. Multiple listing service (MLS) listings are not in the public domain, and third parties are not aware of the details of individual negotiations. Thus, a third party cannot easily create a summary of all data relevant to a purchase or sale.
Feeds are streams of information that are consumable by feed readers. One popular type of feed technology is really simple syndication (RSS). RSS allows visitors of websites and other sources of information to consume the information from the information source by subscribing to a feed provided by the information source (or sometimes by a third party, like feedproxy). A website includes various formatting, from where items are placed on the page (e.g., columns, whether banner ads appear at the top or bottom, and so on), to how particular page elements are formatted (e.g., font style, font size, background imagery, and so forth), to how elements react to interaction (e.g., hover events, clicking on an item, and the like). This makes it difficult for software programs that gather information from many sites, e.g., readers, to handle the varying possibilities of content style. Feeds provided by sites get around this problem by providing the information of the site, such as articles or blog posts, in a stream of text that is uniform across various sites, although feeds may still include audiovisual information such as embedded images, videos, and so on. Feeds are typically the same for all users that receive the feed. For example, two users receiving a feed of blog posts from a web log will typically receive the same set of posts.